Internet prerunner: 1950's

1958 - Bell telephone came out with a data service which made it possible to transmit data over standard phone lines

ARPANET: 1960's

1961 - Leonard Kleinrock at MIT wrote "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", which was the very first paper written concerning packet switching theory..

1962 - Bell sold the very first modem, which could transmit data at 300bps

1962 - Joseph Licklider and Wesley Clark published a paper called "On-Line Man Computer Communication", which provided the concept of a galactic network, which would be much like the internet today, i.e. allow many people to manipulate or view data over a huge network of interconnected computers.

1963 -Doug Engelbart comes up with
an online system which was able to perform browsing, editing through
hypertext and a few other operations that can be found in the internet
today. It should also be noted that he invented the mouse for use with
this system.

1964 - Paul Baran published On
Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications
Network, which discussed packet switching networks. It also outlined
the concept of fault tolerance, or the fact that there is no one
computer responsible for the entirety of the internet. If one computer
fails, the internet continues.

1965 - Ted Nelson came up with the word hypertext.

1965 - Thomas
Marill and Lawrence Roberts were able to connect a computer at MIT's
Lincoln Lab TX-2 to a computer at System Development Corporation's Q-32
in California over a 1200bps telephone line. This was significant
because in doing this they created the first Wide Area Computer Network
(WAN)

1966 - Fiber optics were implemented as a medium for data transmission.

1966 - Donald Davies officially came up with the words for packets and packet switching.

1966 - Lawrence
G. Roberts published "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared
Computers", which was the first source of a plan for ARPANET..

1967 - A man named Wesley Clark designed and presented what today is commonly known as the router.

1967 - Andy van Dam with some help built the hypertext editing system (HES) and the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS)..

1967 - There
was an ACM symposium in Gatlinburg, TN about Operating System design
principles where Larry Roberts presented his first paper on the design
for ARPANET. Also, there were three packet teams present that dealt
with packet networking, including RAND, ARPA, and NPL.

1967 - NPL developed its first packet switching network, that had data speeds of 768kbps

1968 - NRL, located in Great Britain, devised the first WAN to use packet switching.

1968 - Lawrence
Roberts and DARPA came to a final plan and set of specifications for
ARPANET, and released a request for quotation, that BBN won, which was
basically a contract to produce the routers. It should be noted that
larger companies including ATT did not even bid on the contract, saying
such a network was impossible

1968 - To honor Leonard Kleinrock
and his early work with packet switching theory, the network
measurement center at UCLA which he headed up was selected as the first
node in the ARPANET.

1968 - Steve Crocker and his Network
Working Group (NWG) were formed and began working on protocols at the
host level that pertained to transmissions over ARPANET..

1969 - The Department of Defense commissioned ARPANET for research regarding networking

1969 - Four
nodes were added to ARAPANET, including UCLA, Stanford Research
Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the
University of UTAH. It should be noted that the first connection,
between UCLA and Stanford, caused the Stanford computer to crash after
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